Will Hurd, a former representative for Texas and a Republican candidate vying for the presidency in 2024, harshly condemned former president Donald Trump’s provocative statements in 2019. He called out Trump’s tweets criticizing progressive Democratic congresswomen as ‘racist and xenophobic,’ becoming one of the few Republicans in elected office to do so.
While expressing his views exclusively with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour back then, Hurd stated that Trump’s tweets reflect ‘behavior that’s unbecoming of the leader of the free world.’ The former CIA operative also added that Trump should be ‘talking about things that unite us, not divides us.’ Hurd also stated, “I think those tweets are racist and xenophobic. They’re also inaccurate.”
“Look, I’m the only black Republican in the House of Representatives. I go into communities that most Republicans don’t show up to take a conservative message,” Hurd also said, adding, “This makes it harder to take our ideas, and our platform, to communities that don’t necessarily identify with the Republican Party.”
The Republican party member also stated that it was “concerning to me that there are people that think that’s OK, that kind of behavior’s OK” when asked if he was surprised by how so few Republicans reacted to Trump’s remarks. In response to inquiries on why the former President kept ‘doing this kind of stuff’ and whether he believed Trump was racist, Hurd said, “Well, you’d have to ask him those questions. But the comments were indeed racist.”
Back in 2019, when defending House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the former President had alluded to New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with a series of tweets. A group of Democratic women of color who had been vocal about criticizing Trump’s immigration policies denounced the conditions at border detention centers. Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts were among the women who had joined Ocasio-Cortez. But in a series of tweets, Trump implied that the congresswomen were not born in the United States while stating that ‘they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came.’
As per NBC News , Trump had further condemned the four Democratic women at a ‘Made in America’ event outside the White House when he said, “These are people who, in my opinion, hate our country. All I’m saying is, if they’re not happy here, they can leave. There will be many people who will be happy.” Trump continued, “I mean, I look at the one, I look at Omar. I mean, I don’t know, I never met her, I hear the way she talks about al Qaeda,” Trump continued. “Al Qaeda has killed many Americans. She said, ‘You can hold your chest out, you can, when I think of America, huh, when I think of al Qaeda, I can hold my chest out.” Trump had also singled out Ocasio-Cortez for assisting in thwarting Amazon’s intentions to construct a second headquarters in New York. “It’s really hurt New York,” he said. “That was a terrible thing she did.”
As per another report by NBC News , Hurd, who had previously challenged Trump over his support for a border wall, also pointed out that the assaults didn’t make sense politically given that the four congresswomen had engaged in political squabbles with fellow Democrat and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “While you had a civil war going on between the Democratic party, between the far left and the rest of the party, and now they have circled the wagons and are starting to protect one another,” he said.